The Devil's Backbone
by JuniorDreamer
Summary: Rey is six months away from finishing her parole. Kylo Ren just killed a man. They're strangers living on opposite sides of the country and yet, somehow, they can hear and see each other across the miles of land that stretch from New York to New Mexico. As if the distance between them doesn't exist. As if the laws of time and space and gravity have created a loophole just for them.
1. Chapter 1

Chapter One

The first time it happens, Rey is convinced that she has well and truly lost her mind. That the desert heat, stifling and relentless, has finally driven her past the brink of sanity, as she always knew it one day would.

She's on the side of the road, her old Mustang angry and spitting as it bakes under the dry New Mexico sun. The engine is overworked and overheated and she's doing what she can to ease its rage, pouring a mix of water and coolant—both practically boiling from where they lay stashed in the trunk of the car—into the steaming radiator.

That's when the sound of the world falls away and her vision doubles and blurs before it shifts back into focus, into a heightened clarity that is unsettlingly sharp—like a beam of light that forgot to cast its shadow. That's when she sees _him_. A man with dark hair and dark eyes and alabaster skin standing at the edge of the road, less than 20 feet from where she is still bent over the hood of her car.

 _Must be an angel._ The thought floats, unbidden, through her mind. _Or a ghost._

Whatever he is, she knows he can't be real. Living men don't just appear from the nothingness of the desert landscape. They don't wear suits of midnight black, the rich fabric somehow unmarred by the dirt and the grit that floats through the air and lays at their feet. And they don't look at her—a desert rat from a nowhere town—like she is the last bastion of hope in a world ravaged by war. Like she is a miracle.

They stand there for a moment, chests rising and falling in time, and Rey thinks, wildly, that the hazy heat that reflects off the ground is like a mirror. That maybe the man is really her and she is him—in another universe or another time or maybe even in this life now. But then the sun shifts just slightly in the sky and he takes a step forward and the blood that drips from his knuckles is thrown into focus, a cruel flash of red in a world of yellow and brown. The illusion shatters and a cold shiver of fear slices down Rey's spine, raising goosebumps on her skin despite the heat.

The man takes another step and Rey closes her eyes. She starts to count, slow and steady—like this is a game and she's giving him time to hide. She counts in time with the pulse of the blood in her veins, breathing through the fear—old and familiar—that has taken hold of her chest.

She doesn't open her eyes until she gets to ten and when she does, he is gone. An angel sent back to heaven. A ghost turned back to dust.

It should be a relief, to turn and find that she is once again alone on the edge of the cracked and dusty road. It should be a comfort to no longer be hunted by a dark desert spirit. But all she feels, as she wipes the sweat from her eyes with grease-marked fingers, is an aching sense of loss. Like waking up from a dream you've already forgotten. Even when you can still feel the slip of it on your skin and the taste of it on your tongue.

The sun blazes overhead, causing sweat to bead on her back and a dusty rose to rise on the skin of her shoulders. Rey feels these things, taking careful stock of each of them in an effort to tether herself back to some semblance of sanity. Then she slams the hood of the car closed and slides into the front seat, whispering a word of thanks to a faceless god when the engine stutters to life.

She keeps her eyes on the faded yellow lines that mark the road as she makes her way back to her little corner of the desert, never daring to look behind her to see what ghosts might be following her there.

-x-

Kylo Ren is unbalanced, teetering just on the edge of sanity. There's a dead man at his feet, warm blood running in rivulets across the otherwise pristine marble floor. There's blood on his hands too, already sticky and half congealed and Kylo can't be sure whether it's his or the dead man's or some sick mix of the two, but it's the stench of it—dark and metallic—that's choking the air from his lungs. He swallows back the vomit that threatens to rise in his throat and takes deep, steadying breaths—in through the nose, out through the mouth.

It's an old trick from his childhood—something his mother used to make him do when the panic would settle in his chest and he'd gasp like he was born without lungs, like he never learned to breathe. He focuses on the rhythm—the steady rising and falling—and it almost works to quell the panic that's coursing through his veins, but then he looks up and he sees her. A girl. Bathed in light, too bright for the shadowed room they are standing in, and looking utterly terrified.

At first, he feels only relief. Because even though there are countless things about this day that he doesn't understand, he is certain that he is standing in a secure space—one room, windowless, soundproofed, and locked from the inside. So if a girl is there with him, then this must be a dream. And if it's a dream, then the blood on the floor isn't real. And the man he killed isn't dead. And there is still time to go back, to cross over that terrible line in the sand, to erase the blood from his hands, to fix it.

He breathes fully, deeply, the panic receding from his veins like the pull of the moon on an ocean's tide. Then he finds himself stepping toward the girl—this beautiful, miraculous creature that he has somehow dreamed up. He is enthralled by the damp curls that have fallen loose from the bun piled high on her head. By the slow drip of the sweat that falls from behind her ear. By the depth of her green eyes—wide and afraid and _familiar._

She closes those eyes like the slamming of a door and the rejection cuts him to the bone, but it's not enough to keep him from moving closer, bridging the gap between them with each second that passes. He is almost to her. So close he can see the dusting of freckles that cross her nose and her chest. So close he can smell her in the air—a mix of dirt and sweat and engine grease, so much sweeter than the blood he is tracking across the room.

He walks as a man possessed. A wolf. Desperate to touch her, to taste her while he has her in his grasp. Then he blinks, like the fool that he is, and she is gone.

The world seems much louder in her absence. The sounds of the city waft up from the street, too clear, too real. That's when Kylo realizes that he hasn't woken up. Because he isn't dreaming.

Because he is terribly, undoubtedly awake.

He gives himself the span of a single breath to mourn the loss of the girl, the man he might have been for her, and the life they could have lived—in another timeline or perhaps another universe. Somewhere far away from this moment and this room and the man he has chosen to be. Then he pulls a phone from his pocket—prepaid and untraceable—and dials the first of two numbers in the contacts.

Snoke answers on the first ring and though he doesn't whisper a single world, Kylo would know the sound of his rasping breath anywhere.

"It's done," Kylo declares into the void, an answer to an unspoken question.

Snoke laughs, soft and cruel and the sound of it sends a chill down Kylo's spine. "Excellent," he purrs. "Call Hux for clean-up and report to headquarters when you're through. Tonight, we celebrate."

-x-

Rey doesn't breathe a full breath until the weathered gates of Niima Outpost cut a line through the horizon. And even then, her lungs don't fill easily until she pulls up to her trailer, settled in the back of the community amongst the dirt and the few tiny shrubs that manage to peek through the cracks in the earth. Everything is as she left it—the metal hull of the airstream, the makeshift deck made from mismatched pieces of scrap wood, the dirt-stained wooden planters lining the perimeter of the property and filled with succulents—each one a different color, each row a different kind.

The reliability of these small treasures help to calm her nerves and settle her spirit, but she still feels a tug—persistent and strange—at the back of her mind. As if she's been tethered to that place in the road and to the man who stood there. But Rey doesn't have the patience for dwelling on such things. Not when there is work to be done. So she shakes her head and pulls the hair from her face, deftly tying it back in a knot at the base of her neck, and wills herself to focus. To forget.

She tends to the garden first, carefully plucking the more mature plants from their home in the wooden planters and transferring them to individual pots, ready to be sold to tourists passing through the Outpost on their way to grander sights—the Grand Canyon, usually. Sometimes White Sands. She sifts through the soil with bare hands, letting the dirt and the grit bore its way under her nails, staining her skin a ruddy brown. It's a routine she's long since memorized, but she can't help the little rush of pride she feels each time she plucks a plant from the soil, carefully minding the roots, and finds that it has managed to survive—to _flourish_ —with hardly anything at all. Some sun, some shade, a bit of water. A strange, lucky miracle.

The desert sun is low in the sky by the time she finishes with her chores, sending streaks of pink and purple across the rocky formations that are already bathed in shadow. Rey takes a moment to be grateful for the darkening sky, for the dusty air in her lungs, for the wide expanse of open land that surrounds her—so different from the crowded cell and the tiny bunk and the clanking metal bars she sometimes still hears in the quietest of desert nights. She takes a moment to be grateful for freedom—or something like it. Then she dusts her hands off on the side of her faded jeans and grabs a pocketful of kibble from a container stashed under the deck before setting off on the dusty trail that winds through the extent of the property.

The Outpost is quiet this time of night. The vendors have long since packed up their treasures, storing them in trunks and in trailers for another day and another crowd of wandering visitors. She scans the horizon for BB-8, the golden shepherd that controls the market's population of desert mice in exchange for fresh water and warm beds provided by the kindest of Niima's tenants—namely, Rey—but he is nowhere to be found.

"BB-8!" she calls down the trail, now bathed in a dusky grey that makes it nearly impossible to tell the rocks from the shadows.

She waits for the soft shuffling of paws on flattened dirt, but it doesn't come. There is only the soft whistle of the wind in her ears and the low rumble of a truck's engine drifting down from a road she can't see. She's just about to turn back, certain that BB-8 will find his way home when he's ready, when she feels it—the tug on her soul. The sudden dampening of sound. And then, footsteps echoing down the darkened path, too wide and too heavy for a dog, for _any_ animal that stalks the grounds of the Outpost.

Rey turns, eyes narrowed in the darkness, and finds him less than an arms width away. The angel. The ghost. The man with dark eyes and dark hair that falls in soft waves to his shoulders. She loses the breath in her lungs to the shock of it, her body frozen in place by some invisible force.

This time, his hands are clean. But still, there's the fear—sharp and cruel—boring its way through her skull. Adrenaline roars in Rey's veins and suddenly she is ready to run, to scream, to fight for her life the way she has had to fight for it so many times before. But before she can move, before she can do _any_ of it, he does something that shakes her to her core.

He steps back and he speaks, his words a low whisper against her skin in the night.

"Are you real?"


	2. Chapter 2

Chapter Two

Kylo thinks he might be losing his mind. What other explanation could there be for the girl that has somehow appeared across from him in the bathroom of Snoke's favorite club? The same girl from before—the one from the dream that wasn't a dream. He'd blame it on the alcohol, but the truth is he is stone cold sober, his whiskey left untouched and sweating back at the table in the lounge.

She has changed in the handful of hours that have passed since she last appeared to him, but only in small ways. Her hair is tied in a low bun at the base of her neck and her clothes and her hands are stained a dark, rusty color that is much too like the dried blood he scraped from his own skin just hours ago. But the look in her eyes is the same—wild and afraid and _focused_ , like she is ready to face whatever darkness is to come. Like she has faced that darkness before.

Kylo blinks—once, twice, three times, waiting for her to disappear. But every time he opens his eyes, she is there—as solid and as clear as the black metal stalls beside him.

He knows he should turn and go back to his fellow First Order members. He should forget the girl and try to salvage what is left of his sanity. But he can't ignore the burning curiosity he feels when he looks at her, the strange need to _understand_ what this is. Because he doesn't feel crazy. And if it isn't a dream and it isn't a hallucination, it must be something else.

Kylo steps back, drawing courage from the added distance between them, and he whispers the only question he can think to ask into the silence. "Are you real?"

The girl hesitates, eyebrows drawn tightly together like he's given her a riddle that she isn't sure how to solve. Then she steps toward him, into the space he gave away, and she offers her answer. "Are you?"

Her voice is strong and lilting and he swears he can almost see the waves of reverberation that travel from her throat and through the air to settle in his ears and he is so stunned by it he almost forgets to consider the meaning of her words. But then the earth seems to shift under his feet and his vision is split into two and suddenly he is no longer standing just in the bathroom of a club in the heart of New York City, but he is also somehow in the middle of a desert in a part of the country he's never seen.

The two realities sway and shift in front of him and if he focuses he can clearly see the one that must belong to her—miles of open land, hard packed dirt under his feet, trucks rumbling in the distance. Then he adjusts his gaze and the dark walls of the club's bathroom reappear and he can feel the cool, hard edge of the metal sink at his back and the vibration from the thumping drone of music that drifts in from outside the door. The girl is there through it all—steadfast on the dirt and on the tile. A constant in the chaos.

She has her arms outstretched, like a bird about to take flight, and her lips are parted in wonder and Kylo can only assume that she is experiencing the same shift in perspective that has thrown him so thoroughly off balance. Her chest rises and falls erratically and Kylo swears he can almost hear the pattern of her heart, beating in a rhythm much like his own—fast and panicked.

"Where are you?" her voice cuts through the noise in his head, clear and demanding. Her eyes fall on the tiled floor, the black stalls, the mirror that runs the length of the room.

"New York," he answers after a beat. "Where are you?"

She looks around and he guesses that she is now taking in her own surroundings. "New Mexico."

Kylo runs a nervous hand through his hair at this stunning piece of information. "Fuck," he whispers, almost to himself. And then, more clearly, to her— "Is this really happening?"

The girl shakes her head, her hands clenched in tight fists by her side. "You tell me."

The bathroom door swings open before Kylo can respond and with it comes a blast of music and loud voices, making them both jump.

Kylo turns and finds Poe Dameron leaning casually against the open door, his kind eyes cautious and staring.

"Hey," he says, gesturing vaguely to the First Order's usual row of tables at the back of the lounge. "Snoke sent me to check on you."

He pays no mind to the girl in the room and Kylo knows then what he had already suspected to be true—that she is a vision meant only for him. He steals a glance behind him and finds that the girl is still there. But he can feel her slipping away, the edges of her world blurring and fading in exchange for a more solid grasp of his own. He feels the panic creeping into his chest as she bleeds away into the darkened walls. With it comes the anger—old and familiar. At having been interrupted. At watching her disappear again. He wants to reach for her, pull her back to his side of the world, examine her fully and up close until he understands what she is.

But Poe is standing there, lines of concern marking his tanned face and there, just beneath the surface, Kylo sees it—a sliver of suspicion, a fraction of doubt. The inevitability of it hits him then. That he has no true choice in this. That he must play the part he has readily accepted and be the man he was always fated to be.

He allows himself to take one last look at her, now just a shimmer against a blackened wall, and then he carefully arranges the features of his face into the mask he is expected to wear in the presence of his First Order brothers. The mask that is Kylo Ren.

It almost works. But it seems the events of this seemingly endless day have caused new cracks to form and Dameron, who is the closest thing he has to a friend, sees right through them.

"Hux told me about the job. Said things got a little rough."

Kylo thinks of the blood, dark and thick. How it stained the white ceramic of the tub until Hux had doused it with bleach. And then he thinks of the girl, the dirt on her hands and the look in her eyes and there it is—another crack, jagged and raw.

"Come on, Dameron," he finds himself saying as he pushes past the man and reenters the world he once thought he knew. "You're buying me a drink."

It almost sounds normal.

-x-

When Rey was a child, she would dream of a voice. Sometimes it was a roaring scream and sometimes it was the softest of sighs, like the wind took the shape of a person and bent low to whisper in her ear. Sometimes it was kind and sometimes it was cruel, the jagged edge of it coming down to tear slices from her skin. Sometimes it was a child and sometimes it was a spirit that had long since left this world behind for the heavens, the skeleton of its broken body left scattered and bleached on the sun-scorched earth.

It spoke to her of many things she didn't understand and some things she did. Of power and darkness, legacy and seduction, loyalty and betrayal. It spoke to her of stories from long ago and of things yet to come.

It was at once a terror and a comfort and, as the years passed, she began to think of the voice as a friend. A faithful companion that called to her only in the night, when the chill of a desert wind crept under the door and stole to her veins like the venom of a coral snake—cool and paralyzing.

She had long since abandoned the childish fantasies she had once believed to be true—that perhaps the voice belonged to her parents. That maybe they had been stolen away by a punishing king who forbade them from coming to find her. That they waited until their captor drifted to sleep to whisper their messages across the ether, their words becoming scrambled in the eons that separated them from her.

They were fantasies that she gave away to the desert sun in exchange for the truth—that the voice was only a dream, an amalgamation of conscious lies and subconscious truths—of stories she once was told, places she longed to see, words she wished to hear.

But when the night before her split open like a star, the edges of it falling away to reveal the man from the road, she realized another truth. It came after his world of hard metal and clean lines faded away and she was left to walk the darkened trail back to her trailer, to the only true home she had ever known. It was there in the questions that stretched through the impossible distance between them, echoing now in her mind.

" _Are you real?"_ he had asked. _"Is this really happening?"_

The cold truth—whispered to her through the sudden quiet of the night—was that she knew his voice—the powerful cadence, the low timber. She knew it like she knew her own.

It had called to her in a lifetime of dreams.

-x-

Hours have passed, the club and his brothers long since left behind in exchange for the echoing quiet of his Tribeca apartment, and still Kylo can't shake her from his mind—the girl from the desert. He closes his eyes and he can almost feel the warmth that lapped at his skin when he spoke to her and reality shifted in a way that shouldn't be possible, transporting him to the plains of New Mexico though his feet stayed rooted to the ground in New York.

He paces the length of the penthouse, blackened boots leaving tracks on the polished hardwood floor, and replays the events of the day in his mind.

It had started with the man—Canady. A body with a gun they had hired—and promptly fired—for a couple of small operations—ATM scams and petty theft—a few years back. Word had come through the line that Canady was being targeted as a potential informant for the FBI and, well, Snoke couldn't stand for that.

The job usually fell to shadowy figures at the edge of Order membership. Men without names and without titles who took their money and didn't ask questions. But this time, Snoke made sure it fell to Kylo.

" _Consider it a test of loyalty_ ," he had said. " _And of strength. You can't be in this business without getting a little blood on your hands. A lesson your grandfather would have been eager to teach you."_

Canady was a criminal. On the books for possession and trafficking, battery and sexual assault and at least half a dozen other sordid charges and would it really be so terrible if he was permanently scrubbed from the earth? If it protected the Order? If it secured the continuation of his grandfather's legacy? These were the questions Kylo asked himself as he met the man in the secure space and did what he had been told to do.

He hadn't expected the blood to shine quite so bright in the dim of the room and he hadn't expected to look up and see _her_ peering through his soul. But that's what had happened and now he can't think, he can't _breathe_ without seeing her in the back of his mind.

It isn't until later, when there are dark shadows carved under his eyes and the light of a new day peeks out from behind the moon, that he stops to consider what she saw the first time they appeared to one another. The sweat on his brow? The blood on his hands?

The body on the floor?


End file.
